Sometimes I had the uncanny feeling that the circus had been expecting me. How else explain my calm reception, that eerie introduction, the silence and the silent laughter? This question I considered through many a long night, and went out in the morning determined to have an answer, only to be disappointed by their impenetrable diffidence. They were loath to speak of themselves, and it took me a long tedious time to assemble even the outlines of their stories. It is true that I was accepted at once into the life of the circus, but I never felt that I belonged completely in their midst, as though the covenant by which they were bound to care for me demanded nothing beyond essentials. Was the cruelty of the golden children a shade crueller when turned on me? Did Sybil's anger have a keener edge when I came under its cuts?
My first difficulty was to unravel the threads of their relationships. For instance I imagined from the start, when they first appeared beside me in the town, that Angel and Silas were husband and wife. I was wrong, I soon discovered that, but what I did not discover for a very long time, for weeks, was that Sybil was his mate. Sybil of the flaming hair, the icy green eyes, Sybil the austere! I was astonished, and at first repulsed. How could this proud patrician creature allow that old goat to share her bed, her secrets, to paw her gleaming limbs? Sybil, with her cold beauty, her impassioned rages, was a vibrant and untouchable mystery, whereas Silas was just old Tosspot, barrel-arsed, wheezy, a laughable codger. Later, when I recognised Sybil's true nature, a bitter brew of spite and pettiness, I had to wonder how Silas, not so simple after all, could tolerate her. The answer was that she was his odd notion of beauty made flesh, beauty which was an inexaustible source of both wonder and amusement. One day I found her in their caravan fighting with Angel, screaming, foaming at the mouth. It was no uncommon thing, for Angel took a sweet delight in baiting her. Silas sat by the table with his legs crossed, his thumbs in his waistcoat, beaming at them as if to say, look, look, is she not exquisite, my Sybil?-and such a fool!
The pleasure he derived from his wife was intellectual in the main, while his baser longings were directed elsewhere. Once, merrily drunk on poteen, he confided to Rainbird and me his dream, which was to dwell in idyllic concupiscence, his word, with not one but both of the twins, Ada and her dark sister Ida. ‘To have them, one on each side of me, in the buff, their tits in my ears, ah, what a thing that would be!’ The girls were utterly indifferent to his attentions, but their indifference, he insisted, only goaded him into wilder transports of desire. I could never take seriously this farcical longing, partly for the reason that Silas himself regarded it as a perplexing but funny foible of his old age, and partly because, ironically, he was teaching me in his subtle way to take nothing seriously, or perhaps a better word is solemnly.
The most astonishing discovery of all that I made was that Justin and Juliette, those spiteful sprites, were the product of that union between Silas and Sybil. Yes! I confess I found it impossible to believe at first, and, when he told me, I searched Magnus's face for the twitch that would betray the joke, but it was no joke. I looked at the children with new eyes. They were an uncanny, disturbing couple. In spite of their difference in gender, which was minimal anyway, they were doubles in body and spirit, a beautiful two-headed monster, wicked, destructive, unfailingly gay. Magnus merged them into a single entity which he called Justinette. He had the right idea. I was afraid of them.
Magnus was a born clown. He had a long wedge-shaped head topped with a flat mat of furry fair hair. His thin blue-veined nose, with a knob at the tip, was almost painful to look at in its austerity, and his pale moist eyes, peering out through concentric circles of tired brownish flesh, seemed permanently on the point of overflowing with a flood of tears. That long sinewy frame, the mournful grin, provoked immediately in an audience the kind of laughter on which jesters thrive, that uproarious hee-haw with a seed of misgiving lodged at its root. He kept us entertained through all our trials except one, perched on his stool with his hands on his bony knees, spinning his elegant tales.
Our last night in the town was wet and wild. Sabres of black rain swept across the sodden field, the wind keened in the guy ropes of the tent. The show was a washout, and the audience, what there was of it, demanded its money back. We huddled in the caravan around the glowing stove, coughing as the smoke came billowing back down the chimney. Even Angel's stewed tea, strong enough to trot a mouse on, as Silas observed, could not revive our spirits, and we sat wrapped in a cocoon of melancholy until Magnus took out his harmonica and played a jig, always the prelude to a yarn.
‘Did I ever tell you,’ he began, smacking the harmonica on his palm and considering the ceiling with a frown, ‘about the Exploding Coffin?’
We snuggled closer to the stove and wrapped our hands around our teamugs. For all the smoke and the draughts, there is nothing on a stormy night so cosy as a caravan. Magnus's droll voice cast a spell about us and drew us out of our dejection, and when I think of him now I realise that of all the creatures I have lost I miss most his valiant and fastidious spirit. Ah Magnus, my friend.
26
SILAS LOVED the pale twins, and they loved Mario, but Mario's only love was his left hand. He explained his passion to me the day we left the town behind. I rode beside him on the last caravan, which at night I shared with him. It was a gleaming morning, washed clean by the storm in the night. Mario wore his black britches and a loose white shirt. A yellow scarf was knotted tightly around his slender neck. He cut a romantic figure there, with his bandit's black eyes and his angry mouth. In his lap sat Sophie the baby, a solemn watchful child with curly hair.
‘I fuckada woman one time, right?’ he said, chopping the air with the edge of his hand. ‘One time, no more, then she'sa mine, see? You know what I mean? I got her in my head, alia them in here'-he tapped his forehead-'and when I wanta the real woman, who do everything, you know? I justa think about one and-ratta tat tat I See?’
He laughed. Mario's laugh was something to hear, a sharp humourless snicker like the sound of something chipping nicks out of glass. The baby looked up at him with her saucer eyes. He tickled her fondly. On one of his specimen-gathering expeditions he had, to his intense surprise, fathered Sophie on blonde Ada. Delight, yes. His daughter was the one thing which could strike through his congenital beastliness and touch a faint and otherwise concealed vein of tenderness in him. That such a bright warm toy could spring unbidden out of that joyless gallop, there was something to wonder at. Ada's feelings, on the other hand, were quite untouched. She carried her load for as brief a time as possible before she spat out the brat and thrust it on Mario, and forgot about it.
The twins were alike only in appearance. Spiritually they were as different as dark and light. Ada, for all her golden beauty, was one of Mario's kind, sullen, given to incoherent rages, dark laughter, careless cruelty, yet one who, with her wanton ways, displayed a certain vicious splendour. She was a voracious eater. While the rest of us made do with potatoes and bread in various ingenious combinations, she always managed to find meat or fruit, some delicacy, supplied mostly by Magnus, who had a way with snares and things, and who also, I suspect, nursed a secret longing for Ada's wild flesh. Lolling with that negligent grace on her bunk, she would tear in her small white teeth the roasted leg of a rabbit, or a salmon's tender pink flank, greedy, and at the same time indifferent. Her life she lived at the tips of her five senses, and yet if one were foolish enough to strike one's will against hers there came back immediately a startling clang, for there was steel at her centre.